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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



WHAT A CARPENTER DID 
WITH HIS BIBLE 



an Hfcfcrees 

by 

JOHN FRANKLIN GENTJNG 

Professor of Rhetoric in Amherst College 



New York : 48 East 14th Street 



THOMAS Y. CKOWELL & COMPANY 



Boston : 100 Purchase Street 




2nd COPY, 
?89e 



Copyright, 1898, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. 



6144 



The Libr 
of Congi 



C. J. Peters & Son, Typographers, Boston. 
A. Mudge & Son, Printers. 



WHAT A CARPENTER DID WITH 
HIS BIBLE. 



" Is not this the carpenter ? From whence hath 
this man these things ? " Such was the astonished 
inquiry of His life-long neighbors when Jesus of 
Nazareth opened the scriptures so marvellously in 
the Galilean synagogue. And when later He 
stood among the educated Jews in the Temple, in- 
terpreting to them the things of God, men asked 
in equal wonder, " How knoweth this man letters, 
having never learned ? " An inquiry that leaped 
so readily to the lips of all who heard Him, ac- 
quaintances and strangers, common and cultured 
alike, may have also its interest for us. Where, 
then, did J esus of Nazareth get His knowledge of 
the Bible ? 

If we have ever raised the question at all, it is 
not unlikely we have dismissed it with the vague 
notion that our Lord's knowledge and use of scrip- 
ture was something supernatural and mysterious, 
brought over somehow from His divine pre-exis- 

3 



4 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



tence, or received through His baptism with the 
Holy Spirit. But surely, if Ave look to Him as 
Example and Elder Brother, living a genuine hu- 
man life for us to pattern by, a second thought 
must lead us to revise that idea. Eor we want 
Him to live our life with our resources. If we 
regard Him as true Son of man, we must think of 
Him as here among us to prove what can be made 
of man's possibilities, subject to man's limitations. 
To suppose these latter in any point transcended 
would be to endow Him with resources beyond our 
avail, and by just so much to take away the sup- 
port that we seek from His veritable human heart 
and mind. Our very dependence on Him makes 
us slow to do that. In the use of the Bible, there- 
fore, as in other things, we look to Him for guid- 
ance and leading : we may reasonably interrogate 
His life and words to see how a man's powers at 
their soundest and truest, the powers, not of un- 
approachable omniscience, but of study and mem- 
ory and judgment and disciplined meditation, may 
go to work to get a wholesome knowledge of the 
things God has revealed through prophet and law- 
giver, historian and poet. This we may do with- 
out forgetting that He is God manifest in the 
flesh ; nay, is not His Godhead all the more real 
and wonderful when He sits by our side as a wise, 
deep-seeing Teacher, showing us by His own ex- 
ample how to search those scriptures in which we 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE. 



5 



think we have eternal life, and how to find therein 
the wisdom that is unto salvation ? 

It is eminently proper then, I think, to look at 
Jesus as did His neighbors and the cultivated 
Jews when they made those inquiries ; and even 
while we see much more, to see what they saw in 
Him. Their questioning seems to presuppose two 
significant facts about this Teacher of scripture : 
first, that His teaching, while truly authoritative, 
had the authority, not of an uncreated voice from 
heaven precluding all doubt and all answer, but 
of the sound sense, the reasonableness, the sane 
insight, the learning, of a gifted human mind 
reading God's word and will from the human 
point of view ; and secondly, that He who thus 
taught had no visible advantages beyond the sta- 
tion of a Galilean and an artisan. Such contem- 
porary recognition may well have its weight and 
its comfort for us. Here is a carpenter using His 
Bible in a way open to every carpenter and every 
man ; in a way that, whatever more it shows, 
proves certainly that He has not neglected the 
opportunities available to His station in life. 

i. 

Now, I shall want you soon to join with me in a 
brief study of fact ; for this is not a case where 
we want speculation or theorizing : we are going 
to see what the carpenter actually did with His 



6 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



Bible when a supreme occasion came for Him to 
use it. But before we proceed to this, let us 
glance a moment at His home life and surround- 
ings to see what His opportunities for Bible study 
were, and how these were related to His outlook 
upon life. 

Until He was thirty years old, all His life, in 
fact, except between three and four years, Jesus 
was a village carpenter working at His trade in a 
little town not unlike one of our New England 
country Tillages, but more compactly built ; — a 
town whose only fame was disrepute for the rude- 
ness and ignorance — to say no worse — of its 
inhabitants. He belonged thus not to the ranks 
of the well-read and travelled, not to the wealthy 
and leisured, but to the artisan class, to those who 
must by daily labor earn their daily bread, and 
who when they go home from their work at night 
are wearied with the wholesome weariness of hon- 
est toil. His surroundings were such as are often 
used as an excuse for ignorance or neglect of the 
things of the mind ; His moments of studious lei- 
sure had to be reclaimed from hours of labor and 
bodily fatigue. But by what He managed to do 
in His lowly trade He not only honored study ; He 
honored also the artisan class as no other class 
of men since the world began have been honored. 
An honest trade is a Christlike thing. Have you 
ever thought of it ? — the greatest man that ever 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE. 



7 



lived, the man who solved those problems of life 
which have been the despair of philosophers and 
scholars, was a mechanic. I like to think of Him 
as engaged in adding by the work of His hands 
to the homely comforts and conveniences of His 
fellow-men, — as building, constructing, bringing 
something practical to pass. 

But you see His life did not all flow through 
His hands, or become wholly absorbed in artisan 
skill. He was a well-rounded man, not a mere 
animated plane or chisel. It is here that many 
mechanics part company with Him, here that He 
begins to put life in its true proportions. And 
so, from that life of lowly labor, there opened 
constantly windows toward heavenly things ; and 
while He was earning daily bread, He was sub- 
sisting on that divine meat and drink which falls 
to no prince as a luxury, yet which no one is too 
poor to earn. It did not impair any job of His 
carpenter work to let His unfettered mind busy 
itself with the words of Psalmist and prophet ; 
nor was meditation on the sacred histories of old 
at all uncongenial to His plain and humble village 
life. It is natural enough to think, as the people 
of that day thought, that a course of training 
among the doctors at Jerusalem was necessary to 
a sound knowledge of scripture ; and doubtless 
many a mechanic nowadays would excuse his neg- 
lect of the Bible on such ground, Our Lord's 



8 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



life shows how much such an excuse is worth, to 
one who has the will to learn. Here is a me- 
chanic whose university was the work-bench and 
the village synagogue ; and yet He was graduated 
therefrom with such profound and vital views of 
scripture truth that even professional theologians 
were amazed and silenced. 

Now, I am not disposed to think His artisan 
life was wholly a disadvantage to study, or that 
He could necessarily have clone better if, as we say, 
He had gone to college and moved among learned 
men. Learned men often cloister themselves in 
a bookish world of their own, apart from prac- 
tical and every-day interests, where they weave 
unsubstantial, sometimes grotesquely unreal, fab- 
rics of thought that have no fruitful relation to 
any one's actual life. That was one trouble with 
the scribes of Christ's time. But if we can get 
a straight-seeing, open-eyed man of affairs, a 
mechanic or a laboring man or a merchant who 
knows by experience men's commonest needs and 
takes hold of life by the practical end, — if we can 
get such a man to look at the things of God as 
Jesus did, and report thereon sincerely and in his 
own idiom, his report will be worth something, 
it will be adapted to every-day and universal is- 
sues. After all, then, Jesus' carpenter shop was 
no mean school; it kept Him at any rate from 
educating Himself away from the common mind 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE. 



9 



and heart. Consider, then, what a door is open 
to a laboring man with his Bible ; what an actual 
advantage he has, in some ways, over the scholar, 
if he will take it, as the carpenter of Nazareth 
did, in the Spirit of God. 

In one sense our Lord's resources of study, as 
compared with ours, were very slender. For, in 
the first place, His Bible was not so large as ours. 
All His scripture instruction was received from 
the Old Testament. Those patriarchal histories 
and prophetic words on which criticism nowadays 
is apparently shedding so much darkness had light 
enough to guide Him ; or, rather, they were just 
beginning to receive as their illumination the mild 
radiance of His own Messiah life. He was ap- 
proaching them as a pioneer, furnishing the light 
by which He read. The cross and the resurrection 
tomb, which to us are the grand key to all scrip- 
ture, existed as yet only as a faith and a sublime 
purpose. Think what your Bible would be with • 
these and their accompanying teachings left out. 
Then, further, there were no printed books, no 
newspapers, no universal diffusion of literature. 
I am not at all sure that Jesus had a Bible even 
in His home. He may have had to depend on the 
synagogue scrolls for His copy of the scriptures, 
and perhaps on the weekly readings in the Sab- 
bath service for His access to them. Yet, slender 
as in one sense these resources seem, in another 



10 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



sense they were great. In fact, with the eager, 
vitalizing mind that He brought to them, the very 
absence of other resources made these great. We 
have heard of the homo unites libri, the man of 
one book, and of what power he may have when 
that book is woven into the tissues of his life and 
will. Here we have an example. Jesus was a 
man of one book ; but it was a book worthy to 
mould such a man, containing as it did those 
thoughts and histories which were the life-blood 
of a divinely guided nation ; and Jesus brought to 
that book the sanest, sweetest, strongest mind that 
ever looked therein. The unity was complete ; 
man and book smote themselves together, mysteri- 
ously one, so that deep thinkers have given both 
the same name, the "Word. 

What more, then, did He need for His educa- 
tion ? How much more do we need ? I am not 
sure but we are in danger of surfeit now. We 
have so many things to distract us ; our literature 
is swamping us, turning our minds all out-of-doors 
with so many and so trivial things to think of. 
This universal diffusion of knowledge of which we 
are so proud, and on the whole justly, is in some 
ways a doubtful blessing ; it clogs our minds and 
hearts with such pitiably small things, and with 
so many things that are not true. Jesus would 
not let Himself be distracted thus. He kept to 
the main issues of life, and that one Book was His 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



11 



sufficient library and literature. Nor did He have 
to study by rote, as theological students do now- 
adays, as if it were so much Hebrew grammar. 
To a life like His, all consecrated to the one 
thought, " Lo, I come to do Thy will, Lord ! " 
a single reading of divine words was potent for 
much, for it found Him ready ; His loving heart 
was an understanding heart, a remembering heart. 
Yes ; His resources of culture were great, after 
all, for they were the resources of an obedient 
life feeding on the record of a Father's will. And 
the same transcendent means of education, through 
the same illumining Spirit, are open to every low- 
liest man. 

ii. 

And now let us proceed to the study that I 
spoke of: the consideration of a case where this 
young carpenter was suddenly brought face to 
face with what was perhaps the greatest spiritual 
emergency ever recorded in history. In that 
emergency He was completely victorious ; and 
His victory throws a very significant light on His 
habitual study and use of the Bible. 

When He was thirty years old He attended a 
revival meeting held in the open air on the bank 
of the river Jordan. Here He was baptized. Im- 
mediately thereafter, having evidently decided to 
discontinue working at His trade, He set out to be 



12 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



a leader and teacher of men. But His way to this 
mission was, to begin with, a strange one ; leading 
neither to the city, as we should expect, where the 
leaders of thought and opinion were, nor back to 
His village home, where among His neighbors He 
could communicate His new enthusiasm. Obey- 
ing a mysterious and holy impulse, He went up 
from the Jordan, all alone, to the depths of the 
wilderness, there to take account of mental and 
spiritual stock, prove His fibre and fitness for the 
great work that lay before Him. There He re- 
mained many days without food, going through 
strange searchings of heart, and afterward, when 
He was weak and hungering, having to meet the 
subtlest and craftiest attacks of Satan, couched in 
most plausible phrase, and masked in the guise of 
the divine — " If thou be the Son of God." 

A mysterious region, that desert of the Tempta- 
tion ; awful in its sacredness. We cannot explore 
the depths of it. Boundless principles of life lie 
revealed in each individual trial, but it is not in 
our province now to stay for these ; nor need we 
speculate on the form of the tempter or the man- 
ner of the temptation. Enough for us that the 
temptation was to the deepest degree real, that it 
took hold of the points wherein we all are tempted, 
and that it was met by practical means that are 
available to every tempted one. 

What means ? Dismiss for a moment the trans- 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE. 13 

cendent aspect of it, and look at the story in a 
matter-of-fact way ; what method of defence do 
you find here employed ? The citation of scrip- 
ture ; that is, the drawing by memory on the 
stores of wisdom and precept already learned and 
in possession. When Satan, taking advantage of 
His hungering state, plies our Lord with the sug- 
gestion to make bread of stones, the quick reply, 
"It is written," proves that the remedy for the 
temptation exists, all ready for use, for the mind 
and heart that will remember and apply it. When 
in the second temptation Satan, in his turn, quotes 
scripture, the answer is, " It is written again ; " 
and thus scripture is interpreted, harmonized, 
made reasonable and conclusive, by scripture. 
And when finally Satan comes out with the most 
atrocious, yet most brilliant proposal of all, the 
young mechanic is not dazzled nor deceived by 
the offer of worldly dominion, for behind Him is 
still a sufficing scripture : " Get thee hence, Satan ; 
it is written." Thus at every step Jesus recalls 
the Bible that He has learned and pondered. 
He is full of it, His thought and spirit saturated 
with it ; it is His arsenal of weapons, His resource 
in emergency, as it has been His meditation in 
life. 

Now, doubtless, you will tell me that another 
endowment for his defence is to be reckoned with 
here 5 namely, His baptism with the Holy Spirit. 



14 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



That is true ; but you will remember also that the 
scriptures do not urge such baptism as miraculous 
or unique in His case ; it was both promised and 
actually given to those disciples who went forth 
to engage in the same spiritual battles. What, 
then, did this add to the efficiency of His defence ? 
Here again, if we are considering an all-men's en- 
dowment, let us look at it through all-men's eyes, 
in the light of common day, not in the dim reli- 
gious light which so easily makes things unreal to 
us. That spiritual baptism was a great source of 
insight and quickening ; being, in fact, the pres- 
ence of the same Comforter whom He afterward 
described as bringing all things holy to remem- 
brance. By such endowment He was put in pos- 
session of His best self ; made alert and keen, 
quick to seize and solve His doubts, making them 
vassal to the divine ideal of life which was His 
allegiance ; armed also with a pure antipathy 
against anything base or self-seeking. Now, such 
a spirit may be enthroned in the heart of man ; 
from above it indeed is, but universally available, 
to give the control in life, to give the casting 
vote in emergency. But it does not supersede 
with us, nor did it with Him, the matter-of-fact 
way of study, meditation, recollection, comparison, 
logical association, such as is open to the plainest 
tasks of life. The Spirit, putting Him in posses- 
sion of His best self, enabled Him to employ to 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



15 



fitting purpose what was already stored in mind 
and ripened in judgment ; to use His brain and 
His reading and His disciplined thought, just as 
you and I may. 

Is it, then, so great a thing to quote scripture ? 
you will say ; why, Satan did the same ; does not 
Shakespeare, with this very scene in mind, say 
the devil can cite scripture to his purpose ? We 
shall have occasion later to see how Satan used 
Bible truth ; what I want you to see here is, that 
there was in our Lord's use of scripture a readi- 
ness, an aptness, a fairness, a largeness, which 
show not only how much the Bible was to Him, 
but how also, in correspondent degree, as it takes 
hold of our lives, it may be a living book to us. 

in. 

For here in this great wilderness trial the car- 
penter was dipping into the great treasure-house of 
ideas in which all His life long he had lived and 
worked. The histories, the counsels, the songs, 
the devout aspirations of His people, as embodied 
in this volume of their literature, had become so 
ingrained in His mind and heart that when occa- 
sion arose He could apply them without hesita- 
tion and without error, just as in His carpenter's 
trade He could without mistake use a chisel for 
one kind of work and an adze for another. How, 



16 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



we ask, did His memory strike with, such unerring 
precision for the exactly fitting precept and prin- 
ciple, out of all that scripture record, for the case 
in hand ? It was because the spirit of His life 
answered to the spirit of the book. There was 
the text ; and every day's experience of His was 
furnishing the commentary. That forty days' fast 
of His, just ended, was His contemporary proof 
of the truth that bread is not man's only food. 
That long thirty years' apprenticeship to a lowly 
occupation, that waiting at the workman's bench 
for the sign that His life's ministry was begun, 
and the patience that such waiting engendered, 
had taught Him not to tempt or hurry the Lord 
His God. That implicit trust in the guiding im- 
pulse of the Spirit, a trust that had driven Him 
here to this stern wilderness, was teaching Him 
that worship and obedience, though leading some- 
times in strange and marvellous ways, were due 
only to that Father in heaven whose commands, 
being all-wise and all-loving, could issue only in 
good. So it was that He was living over those 
old histories of His people in His own life, vitaliz- 
ing them in a new experience, learning the costly 
lessons without sinning the sins. His life was a 
re-enacted Bible. 

Now, here is a thing worth laying to heart. As 
it was with this young carpenter, so in our degree 
it may be with us. Our Bible study may be vi- 



DID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



17 



talized by the fact that we are not only studying, 
but making Bible; for everything that we carry 
out on Bible principles to a holy issue in our lives 
is verifying and establishing the truth that Bible 
principles are fitted to ivork in actual practice. 
They so adapt themselves to human nature and 
divine as to make connection and close the circuit 
in character ; or, as scripture itself expresses it, 
we set to our seal that the Bible is true. Think 
how much more the scriptures meant to Jesus 
when in all His searching of them He had the 
consciousness, " These are they which testify of 
me." That was true of Him in a transcendent 
sense ; but to us also there comes a great spirit- 
ual quickening when in opening the word of God 
we have the sacred conviction, " That means meP 
Every one of us may thus not only learn the 
Bible, but build it anew in the structure of Christ- 
like manhood. 

Jesus had lived and meditated in these scrip- 
ture ideas until they had given color and direction 
to all His mental and moral workings. You re- 
member how Shakespeare in one of his sonnets 
complains of the untoward and corrupting tenden- 
cies of his actor's art; saying that thereby his 
nature is almost becoming subdued to what it 
works in, like the dyer's hand. The poet's life, 
too familiar with follies and unrealities, was re- 
ceiving a coloring that his nobler nature loathed. 



18 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



Jesus had lived for thirty years in the same sphere 
of tendency that every mechanic has, — the ten- 
dency to become narrowed to mere artisanship and 
become an animated working-tool ; but at the end 
of that period we see that His mind had not be- 
come stiffened and fettered by daily drudgery, but 
had received the coloring of the things invisible 
and eternal, the great things of God, in which, 
more truly than in manual labor, He had been 
working. His communion with spiritual truth had 
all along ministered to His mental and spiritual 
emancipation. Our lives are full of such experi- 
ences, both for good and evil. We may become 
in very inspiring degree subdued, or rather disin- 
thralled, to noble things, the large and sane ideas 
of life, if we habituate ourselves to dwell with 
them and think in their dialect. But also, alas, 
we can become subdued to very little things, nay, 
and to things murky and sordid, so that memory 
and imagination will refuse to deal with anything 
else. " Son of man, hast thou seen what the an- 
cients of the house of Israel do, in the dark, every 
man in the chambers of his imagery ? " It is 
infinitely deplorable when the chambers of our 
imagery are hung round only with evil and defil- 
ing things ; and hardly less so when our mind has 
taken the dimensions of belittling things. For it 
is just the things that have taken possession of our 
imagination, the things that are so shot through 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



19 



the warp and woof of our life that we cease to 
think of their influence, — it is such things that 
color and control our character. 

Nor does it stop with imagination. The real 
test of study is when the subjects of study get 
into the will, so that when the time of fruitage 
comes, or when a supreme emergency arises, it 
may be seen how principle bursts into deed. You 
see how the Bible principles asserted themselves 
through Christ here in the wilderness. You can 
trace something like it in every one's life, — 
thoughts working themselves through imagination 
into will and act. You can see it in the play-life 
of boys, when Eobinson Crusoe sets them to ex- 
ploring desert islands, and Cooper's novels send 
them on the war-path after Indians. You can de- 
duce it from the lives of your neighbors, when 
you observe what is the staple of their reading. 
Some minds are full of the details of the daily 
papers, — prize-fights and cyclones and murders 
and railway accidents. The sensations and casu- 
alties of the day are their intellectual meat and 
drink. Some minds are full of the affairs of their 
neighbors, — all the scandal and gossip that can 
be smelled out in the community. Some minds 
think and move in the unreal world of the cheap 
novelist. Now think what mental furnishing such 
people have ; think how ill-provided they are for 
the exercise of that calm and large wisdom which 



20 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



is every man's birthright ; think how helpless and 
forlorn their situation when any searching moral 
emergency arises. And then think of this young 
mechanic in the wilderness, exposed to the craf- 
tiest attacks of the devil, and overcoming them 
all. The mystery of all this is not so great as you 
would think. Jesus had expended on holy and up- 
building themes the life that you and I waste on 
gossip and the newspapers. He had thought about 
them so much that memory and association and 
habit were all interwoven with them ; that is the 
real difference between His mind and ours. What 
would not result, friends, if, instead of turning our 
minds all out-of-doors, dissipating them on trivial 
and characterless, not to say harmful things, we 
should build them on something that would give 
them stamina and principle, insight and firmness, 
when the day of stress and trial comes ? It is 
really a simple matter. It does not so much in- 
volve studying more than we study now, as it 
does transferring the emphasis and interest of our 
life, learning to love and apply the things of God. 
When we really love them, when we really lean 
our whole weight upon them, then they will stick 
to our memory, and color our deeds. 

That simplifies the method of study too ; it be- 
comes a very matter-of-fact thing. A great deal 
is said about Bible study nowadays ; and I am 
sometimes tempted to think in my haste that there 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



21 



is so much more said about it because there is 
so much less of the real thing. There is great cry 
— and little wool. Great clamor about clubs and 
classes and courses, about inductive investigation 
and historical criticism ; great accumulation of ap- 
paratus — what Carlyle calls " precautionary and 
vehiculatory gear" — for setting out on systematic 
study ; and all so formidable that the common and 
unlearned are scared away ; with the result that 
Bible study is relegated, for the most part, to 
trained theologians who are paid salaries to know 
their Bible and use it. Now, here is a book trans- 
lated into the plainest and sweetest English in the 
world; a book that tells the history of common 
people, — fishermen and publicans and mechanics 
and tent-makers, as well as of kings and proph- 
ets ; what, then, is to hinder the artisan of to-day 
from learning how his fellows in old times fared, 
and profiting by their experience ? That is what 
this carpenter did; and because His mind re- 
sponded spontaneously to holy things, and leaped 
to meet them when they were found, He could get 
enough, perhaps from weekly listening in the syna- 
gogue, to stand Him in glorious stead in the most 
insidious trial to which human being was ever sub- 
jected. Or if you wish to come nearer our own 
times, think of our devout grandfathers and grand- 
mothers, who in spite of the strenuous exactions of 
their daily labor thumbed their old leather-covered 



22 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



Bibles to pieces, and became so saintly that the 
light of Heaven shone in their faces. "We search 
laboriously after the strength of the Puritan char- 
acter, and ask the secret of it. There is where it 
lay. It was built on that Book, on day and night 
assimilation of the truths of God. And that was 
Bible study. But it was no more formidable to 
them, no more thought of as a matter of learned 
research and erudition, than is our minute gather- 
ing and retailing of neighborhood or newspaper 
gossip to us. They loved the Book, and the Book 
was their upbuilding. 

IV. 

Another thing that we note in our Lord's quo- 
tation of scripture here is that He is making a 
wise and discriminating use of historic parallels 
and experiences. The passages that He cites are 
not catch- words but lessons, — great and inburned 
deductions of human history. There is about them 
something large and universal ; they are the truths 
that, once expressed, carry their own evidence. 

The lives of us all furnish illustrations of what 
I mean. The lawyer has his digests of cases and 
opinions ; he will not take a step forward without 
carefully interrogating what has been done and de- 
cided in similar case before. The statesman, the 
legislator, has his body of precedents. We all have 
our peculiar lessons and warnings of experience ; 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE. 



23 



we say, "I was bit once by such a business ven- 
ture ; I don't get caught that way again ! " Now, 
our Lord's mind was running on a specific his- 
tory that was so parallel to this temptation of His 
in the wilderness that it contained, all worked 
out beforehand in type, the lessons of this expe- 
rience, ready to His hand. As He was now in 
the wilderness forty days, so the Israelites, His 
own ancestral people, had wandered forty years in 
a wilderness, had sinned and suffered, had mur- 
mured and been chastened ; until that period had 
earned the name of "the day of temptation in the 
wilderness." You have doubtless noticed that 
every passage here cited by our Lord was taken 
from the Book of Deuteronomy, that book wherein 
the forty years' period is reviewed and its lessons 
drawn. Thus His finely seeing mind made that 
piece of history a guiding-post for a time of sim- 
ilar stress and emergency ; so that man need not 
pass that way again and sin the same sins. You 
see also that in consulting the Bible His mind did 
not have to wander vaguely and uncertainly over 
trackless fields of counsel ; he was living in the 
spirit of one great era of His people's life, and 
that was enough. Nor was He dependent on a 
catchword here and there, or on some snatch of 
quotation torn from its occasion and context, like 
Satan's half-truths ; He was moving in such con- 
versance with the large spirit and trend of scrip- 



24 WHAT A CARPENTER 



ture as to get its true perspective, its points of 
emphasis, its predominating note. When tempted 
to make bread of stones, He simply recalled what 
was the great object-lesson of the manna, the 
bread rained on the hungry Israelites from heaven. 
When tempted to put God to an arbitrary test by 
casting Himself down from the temple, He re- 
called how Israel had once tempted God, saying, 
" Is the Lord among us or no ? " and w T hen He 
thought of that His answer to Satan was ready. 
When tempted to bow down to Satan's method 
of securing Satan's acknowledged dominion, He 
simply fell back on that saving, sobering duty of 
man : What doth the Lord require of thee but 
to fear Him, serve Him, cleave to Him, swear by 
His name ? and it was enough ; He would seek no 
shrewder, more brilliant way to success ; He would 
trust to the Godlike in scorn of consequence. So 
the historic parallel yielded its lesson ; and Jesus 
was victorious where His stiff-necked ancestors 
had failed. 

The spirit in which our Lord approached this 
portion of the scripture furnishes an instructive 
contrast to what we are sometimes compelled to 
see in the so-called higher criticism. The Book 
of Deuteronomy, as you know, has been a great 
battle-ground of the critics ; some maintaining that 
its lessons belong to the time purported ; others 
that it was a pious fraud — which, however, they 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



25 



disguise with a smoother name — perpetrated in 
the time of King Josiah. And the pity of it 
is that while they are wrangling over this ques- 
tion, the lessons of the book, its life and power, 
pass well-nigh unheeded. What difference would 
such question have made in Christ's study of it ? 
Hardly more, I imagine, than would the idle ques- 
tion whether the book had been written on parch- 
ment or papyrus. The guidance that He drew 
therefrom was a guidance of the heart, of the 
spirit which maketh alive rather than of the letter 
which killeth ; and so His lesson, well and faith- 
fully learned, would be none the less real and val- 
uable, though the words He cited had never been 
actually spoken, any more than our lesson of hum- 
ble self-sacrifice would be any the less valuable 
though we learned it from the career of Jean Val- 
jean, 1 who never lived at all. The lesson was so 
true to God's holiness, to His nature, and to the 
needs of stern experience, that it furnished Him 
strength and wisdom to overcome. That is what 
truth means : not the digging-up of some dead and 
buried fact, but the creation, by means of a vital 
principle, of a new fact in life. We easily get 
false ideas of what the Bible stands for, and go off 
on questions of dead fact, of modes and times, of 
texts and various readings; when it is the great 
questions of heart and conduct, of spirit and obe- 
1 The hero of Victor Hugo's Les Mistrables, 



26 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



dience, that are stretching forth hands of appeal 
to us. Did Prometheus actually steal fire from 
heaven for the needs of mortals? What matter 
whether he ever did or not, or whether it came 
some other way? — we have the fire. So also we 
have the unshakable fact that the Bible is so true 
to the divine that by it we are redeemed and 
saved, and so true to the human that it fits every 
deepest experience and need of our soul. It is 
truer than fact ; it is more valid than documentary 
evidence, for it has the power of evidencing itself 
anew. Let us hold ourselves to that power of it, 
whatever else we let go. That is the great his- 
toric parallel that it furnishes every man ; a his- 
tory that lives and multiplies and reduplicates 
itself until every man has worked the Bible into 
his character and destiny. 

I like to think, too, how this use of a historic 
experience opens a view into the large, loving, uni- 
versal heart of Christ. There He was, so iden- 
tified with mankind in spirit that their history 
had become as it were His ; He took their ex- 
periences and wrought them to a holier issue ; in 
their past sufferings He suffered victoriously ; over 
the scene of their blind and staggering journeys 
He walked in heavenly light. Alone He was 
here in the desert ; but it is no ascetic or misan- 
thrope who thus identifies Himself with the story 
of His people and His race ; it is a heart beat- 



BIB WITH HIS BIBLE, 



27 



ing in unison with theirs as He lives their life 
over again, and snatches victory from their defeat. 
May not the same high mission be ours in our 
degree, as we thrill reponsive to the same heart, 
and walk in the wisdom that this Book imparts ? 

v. 

One more thing must not go unnoticed : it is 
that in our Lord's use of scripture His interpre- 
tation and applications are based on broad and 
sound common sense. When Satan in a subtle 
piece of special pleading plies Jesus with His own 
word, "It is written," the quick answer comes, 
" It is written again." The Bible must hang 
together, one part throwing light on another, one 
part harmonizing with another, and, above all, 
every part in harmony with the large Holy Spirit 
of God. Being the word of the one changeless 
God, it is a unit, the word of Him who through 
the eddying ages has transmitted the record of 
His majestic will and purpose. That dictates 
that every word of scripture be studied with refer- 
ence to its occasion. What is written for a time 
of sunshine may not be so applicable to a time 
of stress and storm. What is written for a life 
of trust may not furnish the needed guidance for 
an hour of doubt. Satan's quotation is true as 
far as it goes ; but garbled as it is, and forced into 



28 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



an alien application, it is a half-truth. " He shall 
give His angels charge over thee," it runs ; and a 
priceless assurance it is. But it is addressed to 
hirn who is regarded as dwelling in the secret place 
of the Most High ; while Satan seeks to put our 
Lord in the vague position of one who does not 
know whether he dwells there or not, and is trying 
to find out by testing. It makes a great difference 
what the connection and occasion of a truth are. 
Further, whatever is written must be taken with 
its conditions and context, must be taken whole. 
" To keep thee in all thy ways," the original text 
runs ; but Satan leaves out that clause. That con- 
dition colors the promise very materially. In all 
thy ways, the legitimate ways of one who is con- 
sciously in the secret of God, the ways of love, 
trust, obedience; not in any fantastic whim that 
may come into your perverse head. Common sense 
requires such condition ; the spirit of confidence 
and dependence presupposes that. To expect or 
demand upholding, whatever ways you choose, 
whether it be walking in unquestioning commu- 
nion, or casting yourself rashly down from assu- 
rance, is to tempt God. Make His ways and will 
yours, and His ministers are about you to bear 
you up, the powers of the universe are for you ; 
how can you expect it otherwise ? Eemarkable it 
is to observe how completely, in his only recorded 
attempt at citation, Satan misses the spirit of 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



29 



scripture completely; while he twists its words 
into a subtle suggestion of evil so elusive that it 
seems the superlative of good. And how Christ's 
answer clears the poisoned air as with a breeze 
from the east, — " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord 
thy God." That is what we find when, comparing 
part with part, and scripture word with its spirit 
and occasion, we supplement the first color of " It 
is written " with the sturdy good sense of " It is 
written again." 

This very answer of our Lord is a plea for 
broad and thoughtful study, for the exercise of 
consecrated judgment and good sense on the words 
of God. Interpretations, whether of great things 
or small, are to test their validity by flowing with 
the currents of divine revelation. Any little maxim 
of practical life has roots as deep as the nature of 
God, just as every man's land, however diminutive 
in area, extends downward to the centre of the 
earth. It was this vital connection with eternal 
principles that J esus made in every line he quoted ; 
however small its theme, with its context and in- 
volvements it became immeasurably great. One 
is reminded here, by contrast, of that patchwork 
way of studying and interpreting scripture which 
arrays all the whosoevers and all the moreovers 
that can be found, or which finds worlds of sug- 
gestiveness in the fact that the word precious 
occurs just seven times (the sacred number) in the 



30 



WHAT A CARPENTER 



Epistles of Peter. There is seldom anything large 
and fertile in such manner of study. It is not 
founded on the deep things of God, or on the sav- 
ing good sense of life ; and so it may easily become 
a pious trifling, or a sanctified juggling with words. 
The carpenter of Nazareth points out the better 
way ; for every page of his Bible is luminous not 
with mere ingenious combinations of words, but 
with spirit and life. " These are they," said He, 
" which testify of me ; " and in all His life, of 
labor and teaching, of joy and success, of hardship 
and temptation, He was aiming in the sound and 
practical way to answer to that divine testimony. 

So it was that the carpenter used His Bible ; 
just as we use a truth in which our whole life is 
enlisted. That is very different from using it as 
an oracle, or a talisman, or a formulary against 
evil, as people in the Middle Ages used to do ; 
equally different from binding it in Turkey mo- 
rocco, and keeping it on a marble-topped centre- 
table, as people sometimes do nowadays. It means, 
rather, letting the Bible spirit breathe through 
your lips, your plans, your intercourse, your action, 
shaping the ideas that are most potent to mould 
your character; then you will find that it is a 
Book to make you wise, and that the end of such 
wisdom is salvation. 

I cannot think the artisan class is degenerated 



BID WITH HIS BIBLE. 



31 



from what it was in the time of Christ. They 
may still claim as their inalienable birthright the 
soundness of heart and clear straightforwardness 
of vision which will enable them to thrive on the 
Bible, as did their fellow-craftsman of Nazareth. 
And if they, then every class. Nor can I believe 
that our churches have degenerated from what 
the Berean church was ; we have the same, nay, a 
better, opportunity to search the Scriptures daily 
with sound and wide-awake minds, to see if these 
things are so. If we are to become subdued to 
what we work in, like the dyer's hand, let us 
school heart and mind to leave belittling things, 
and work in the great ideas of God ; and let it be 
our aim and glory, individuals, churches, associa- 
tions alike, to walk so congenially, so trustingly, 
so faithfully, in this sublime scenery of scripture 
truth that the world seeing us may say, Behold 
the man, behold the company, whose meat and 
drink is the will and word of God ! 



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